


William MacGonagall Was His Own Disaster (no Tay Bridge involved)

by wendymarlowe



Category: The Tay Bridge Disaster - William McGonagall
Genre: Bad Poetry, Gen, No Really You're Asking For It By Reading This, Not sure it scans but it damn well rhymes, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-05 19:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16373231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wendymarlowe/pseuds/wendymarlowe
Summary: If you're not familiar with William MacGonagall's famous poem "The Tay Bridge Disaster," go read ithere. If you survived that, know that this fic is more of the same but with the sass turned up to eleven.





	William MacGonagall Was His Own Disaster (no Tay Bridge involved)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lnhammer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lnhammer/gifts).



> Thank you, larryhammer, for being the only person on the entirety of AO3 who read William MacGonagall's poetry and thought "Golly gee, I sure with there were more like this out there!"
> 
> Lucky for you, I can't turn down a challenge. Or a chance to make my former English teachers cry.
> 
> Don't say I didn't warn you.

In the year 1880, William MacGonagall  
Wrote for the world a poem so terrible  
It's been enshrined as the Scots' most unbearable  
Crime against words and the misuse of rhyme.  
He'll live in infamy a very long time.

"The Tay Bridge Disaster" was his third purvey:  
In "The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay"  
He hoped God protects passengers by night and by day.  
His later "Address to the New Tay Bridge" did say  
It was "Strong enough all windy storms to defy."  
MacGonagall was one optimistic guy.

His life is a study in not giving up.  
He wrote two hundred poems and all of them sucked.  
Heck, for seventy years he claimed he was a Scot  
When his Irish birth records proved he was not.  
(I wouldn't have known about all of this tedia  
If I hadn't consulted the great Wikipedia.)

He was a failed weaver, with five mouths to feed, but  
He then turned to acting to earn what they needed.  
His MacBeth was so bad that he paid for the privilege  
Of abusing MacDuff and then choosing to live, which  
Throws off the whole play. This guy was a real b*tch.

So back to MacGonagall: here was a poet  
Who wrote horrid verses and never did know it.  
At age 52, he claimed that a "flame"  
Seemed to kindle up his entire frame  
"Along with a strong desire to write poetry."  
(So much for those five hungry kids he was s'posed to feed.)

Delusions of grandeur brought their own euphoria  
So MacGonagall offered to dear Queen Victoria  
To chronicle all of the nation's memoria.  
The form letter came back as "Thanks, but no more o' ya."  
He fixated on "Thanks." Thought, "Now I'm the Queen's poet!"  
(Because that's how the Queen was likely to show it?)  
Spoiler alert: he had no gift for rhyme.  
He'll live in infamy a very long time.

So he, "the Queen's poet," walked on foot _sixty miles_  
To show off his poems and to seek the Queen's smiles  
But the guards were like "No! Her poet's Lord Tennyson!"  
So our boy trekked the whole sixty miles BACK again  
Never quite understanding he should take offense.  
(Sometimes I admire white dude confidence.)  
The folks of Dundee, though, loved their poems heinous.  
He was "so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius."  
William MacGonagall epic FAILed at rhyme:  
He'll live in infamy a very long time.

Undaunted, he sold his chapbooks in the streets  
And his friends all pitched in to help him release  
Three anthologies: "Poetic Gems," all three books claimed.  
The irony's painful. They should be ashamed.  
So with their enabling, MacGonagall persisted  
Assaulting the Queen's English, mostly assisted  
By work at the circus, where the Big Top enlisted  
Him to read his poems and the crowd to assault him  
With rotten tomatoes (and who here could fault them?).  
Fifteen shillings a night,  
I guess, made it all right.  
Many a modern poet will confess  
To working more and earning less.

**Author's Note:**

> No seriously, major thanks to Wikipedia. Heaven knows I wouldn't have researched this dude's biography this thoroughly without it.


End file.
